


Wall

by olliya



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Elements of Horror, F/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29804160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olliya/pseuds/olliya
Summary: He would normally be totally her type. Tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Heck, he even had long hair!But with this one, Sakura wanted nothing to do.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Madara
Comments: 12
Kudos: 53





	Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [victoriacapo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victoriacapo/gifts).



> The story idea is from victoriacapo! I hope you like my execution!

He would normally be totally her type. Tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Heck, he even had long hair!

But with this one, Sakura wanted nothing to do.

He was sitting across the aisle of the bus, one row before her. Facing her, unfortunately.

The bus was full of people, as usual during the morning communing hours. The day was bright and Sakura was leaving the bus in six stops only. And then going down a busy street, no bushes, no dark alleys or corners, to her uni building. Which had a porter and cameras on the door. Nothing, absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

And the man wasn’t even looking at her. Meaning, at her specifically. Because he was swiping with his, seemingly a bit bored, gaze back and forth across the bus. His eyes were most disconcerting – like that of some predatory bird sitting high up, watching rodents scramble around their businesses, having no idea which one of them would become its lunch.

A shiver went down Sakura’s spine. She shouldn’t be imagining such things. And even less visualizing them. It was asking for trouble.

Instead, she took out her phone, and pretending to read, she focused on what she always found the most useful mean of keeping the evil away from her. Building a wall.

Her grandmother taught her that, and her grandmother was a wise woman. Sakura practiced this skill, and all the others she had learned from her, more times than she could count over the years. Whenever she felt threatened, whenever she wanted to keep people, and things, different things - mostly those nasty fears and doubts and voices telling her how little she was worth, away she would build a wall. Brick after brick, in a circle around her. But it was the first time that she was building it against a person that felt threatening on this level – not physically, not at all. Against someone who gave her such chills.

Sakura swiped at the screen and mentally put the first brick in front of herself. Even the act of forming the barrier was calming her down. It was her protection, her castle. She was safe. Things didn’t enter uninvited, even the worse ones, that was what grandmother used to say.

The first two layers stood. Sakura looked at the man from under her eyelashes – he was staring through the window.

Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe he was just a completely ordinary, innocent person. Maybe she was being paranoid.

But better safe than sorry. A bit calmed down with each layer of her invisible, mental bricks, Sakura kept building. When the wall reached her waist, the muscles in her neck relaxed. When it reached the level of her eyes, she started thinking that this entire wall-building was a bit stupid.

When her stop came, she threw her bag on her shoulder, stood up and went down the aisle passing right next to the black-haired stranger without much fear nor much thought at all.

There were quite some many people leaving the bus on her stop, and she had to wait. Luck had it that right next to that man. But Sakura’s phone just pinged and she was too preoccupied with fishing it out of the bag to worry too much, when the man leaned towards her and asked in a low voice: “Building a wall, weren’t we?”

Sakura jumped and jerked away, unable to take her eyes away from the eyes of the stranger.

The movement of the people behind her forced Sakura to move and drove her out of the bus, onto the sun-lit street. She started breathing only when the bus disappeared behind the corner.

That evening she called Ino and had her come pick her up after the last lecture on a pretense of going shopping. Then, money be damned, she took a taxi home.

At home, she resorted to what she never did before. Her grandmother told her that during the war she had been doing it every night. And no enemies ever entered. Humans nor otherwise.

Sakura cut the pinky of her left hand with her home-scalpel (she had an exam tomorrow, she needed to be able to write, for gods’ sake!) and smeared a horizontal line on the window pane of all the windows. Which wasn’t many – just two in the room and the balcony door. Kitchen and bathroom in her tiny student apartment were windowless. Then she did the same with the doors.

Then she sat under three blankets, trying to study, but more often than not her thoughts were escaping to her grandmother, as she was trying frantically to recall what exactly she had to say about the procedure. And Sakura knew all to well, that one moment of leniency and her thought would fly straight to that dark-haired stranger. But she wouldn’t let it. She wouldn’t let her mind call to him, even out of fear, and especially not in the middle of the night!

Drinking one coffee after another and supporting herself with particularly tedious and boring parts of _Anatomical pathology_ handbook for the exam tomorrow interchangeably with some papers on blood-parasites related to malaria for the course work due next week, Sakura managed through the night without falling asleep. Which maybe wasn’t exactly *the* wisest strategy just before the exam, but Sakura knew how to prioritize. The exam could always be re-taken in the second term (if it would even be necessary, as Sakura was pretty confident in her knowledge even when stressed and sleep-deprived) and falling asleep in such a situation… That could have irreversible consequences. About nature of which she decided not to even think.

The bus remained the main problem. She had to take it, she couldn’t switch to going everywhere with a taxi, her budget would collapse within less than a week. Plus, taxi during the rush hours was like playing roulette, and she had to be on freaking time to her freaking classes!

Going to the bus stop, in the full sunlight Sakura finally allowed herself to think about the stranger. He had seen through her technique! Moreover – he had realized that she even *was* doing something to shield herself!!! No one should be able to! Those were only thoughts in her head, and then her chakra – as grandmother was referring to this energy that was coming from the inside of her - concentrated around her body. Was the man able to read her mind? Or was he able to somehow perceive the chakra? The concept of chakra wasn’t known in to regular people, it was something grandmother had learned long time ago and far away from here. So far away and so long ago that she had always presumed that talking about it wouldn’t make sense. Even though Sakura asked, multiple times; the last time being on grandmother’s deathbed.

No one knew about the chakra, let alone was able to see it. No one.

Combined with the eerie feel the man gave off right off the bat…? That aura of maliciousness, of something… unholy. Was that man even a human? Sakura’s fingers clenched reflexively around the centrifuge tube in her pocket. 

The bus was her problem.

Luckily, the vehicles that were commuting on her line were ones with only two entrances - front by the driver, and wider ones with two wings in the middle. Sakura entered at the front, paying attention to be the last passenger boarding. Then she pretended to drop her bag and quickly smeared with her finger along the doorstep.

Dipping her hand in the unscrewed tube hidden in her purse Sakura went towards the middle door. She kneeled down adjusting her shoelaces, and when she was sure no one was looking, she smeared another protective line across the big doorstep. The blood was diluted to unobtrusive light pink colour and acidified with lemon juice against coagulation. Completely unnoticeable, and definitely unrecognizable as blood. Still, it was blood. It was enough. It should be.

It’d better be enough.

Somewhat calmed down, Sakura leaned against the glass barrier by the large door.

She didn’t even know where had the man boarded the bus yesterday. When she had sat down on her usual spot, he hadn’t been there. Next time she looked up from over her notes – he had been in front of her.

Fourteen stops till the uni. Thirteen. Twelve. Sakura’s nail landed between her teeth. Maybe she was exaggerating, she tried thinking. But no, she couldn’t talk herself into believing that. The presence of the man was still almost palpable in the bus. And it wasn’t something that could be ignored.

But still, maybe it was just a chance encounter, maybe she would never see him again. On what basis did she even start to think that there would be a pattern? Sakura rubbed her forehead. Why was she so convinced that it was not the first and the last time seeing him?

He had been in this bus by chance and she would never see him again, right? Right?

She was just starting to get convinced by her own line of thinking when the bus halted at the stop by the National Theater.

And there he was right in front of her, within an arm’s reach. His eyes exactly on the level of hers, as she was standing on the elevated floor of the bus. Dark hair black that shining violet in the sun. A smile stretching his lips.

Sakura froze.

“Well, it seems I will have to take the next bus…” drawled the stranger not stopping to smile. He somehow managed to glimpse down at the, perfectly invisible by now, line painted with her blood, and keep her eyes plastered to his.

The door closed.

The inhale she made could be heard in the entire bus. She didn’t care. She staggered backwards away from the door, and slumped heavily against the opposite window. The air was entering and exiting her lungs at speed as if after a breakneck sprint, but it seemed to bring no oxygen to her blood. Sakura panted fighting not to suffocate.

She almost missed her stop, and then she went to the wrong building, and got late for the exam. Which she promptly failed, because out of 10 questions she only wrote some incoherent scribble for two and left the pages blank under the remaining ones.

Only after lunch she got herself together enough to analyze the situation.

Her protection worked. He noticed it, and he stayed away.

That settled couple of other issues as well – he was definitely able to notice things he shouldn’t be able to. And: he looked freaking different than the day before!!!

Yesterday, he had been a man in his thirties. Today the face that she looked at was young, that of a boy her age, maybe younger. As yesterday he was bulky, filling up the entire bus seat, the boy that he was today was slender, as if grown in height already, not quite in breath just yet.

Yet, it was unmistakably the same man. Same facial features, same aura. Same eyes. Despite warm sunshine filtering through the leaves and licking her skin, Sakura shivered.

Not a human. At least that was clear.

She took a taxi home. She tried to get Ino to overnight with her, but Ino had a date. With other girls she wasn’t on such close terms to propose a spontaneous overnighting.

She slept with lights on and windows shut. She thought she would suffocate.

Yet in the morning she woke up to another perfect, bright and sunny day.

So, telling herself to be brave, Sakura went to the bus, painted the lines on the both doorsteps and took her seat. Counting the stops until the theater she tried not to panic.

And he was there again, he caught her eyes through the window and curved his lips into a smile. Mortified, she couldn’t stop looking.

The next day he was different again – and elderly gentleman seated on the bus stop bank, both hands on the handle of a cane, white hair in grandiose disarray. Seeing her, he lightly lifted his hat in a greeting.

The fourth day there was some problem with the traffic, and the previous bus must had fallen out of the schedule, as there were so many people trying to get to her one. Painting the lines was an insanity in these conditions, but Sakura was ready for every insanity. She fought with her elbows to get from the front door to the middle ones, and she manage to paint the second line two stops before the theater.

And there she stood there, much too close to the door than she would like to.

When the bus stopped, he was there, looking again as he had on their first meeting.

His eyes were the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. They were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The man tilted his head and smiled.

He was the most she had ever seen.

She didn’t know what kind of ‘the most’. But the most.

She was looking into his eyes, and yet somehow, she was able to see him whole, to perceive the aura around him, power radiating from him. Terrifying. Terrifying to the bone.

Yet, she couldn’t turn away her eyes. She was drowning, she needed air.

His eyes. His lips turned into a half-smile. His entire being…

Him, him, him…

Sakura lifted her foot and took a step across the blood-line.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading and please tell me what you think!


End file.
